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AR# 40601

iMPACT Indirect Programming - Spansion Flash Sector Size Support

Description

iMPACT supports Spansion S25FL-P/S devices. What sector size does it support (64kB or 256kB)?

iMPACT also supports the Spansion FL128S and FL256S devices which have 4kB sector sizes. Is it possible to read/write to the 4kB sector sizes?

Solution

iMPACT supports Spansion S25FL-P/S devices. What sector size do we support (64kB or 256kB)?iMPACT supports only 64kB sector size. From the Spansion website, the only 512Mb Spansion device (S25FL512S) is 256kB sector size. iMPACT only supports 64kB sectors for 128Mb and 256Mb devices, but for 512Mb the only part Xilinx supports are 256kB sectors.

The Spansion FL128S and FL256S devices also have 4kB sector sizes. Is it possible to read/write to the 4kb sector sizes? Sector size is really only a factor for erase. These parts, as well as most SPI flash devices will read at a byte level and program (write) on a page level or even on a byte level. So, it is certainly possible to read and program the 4kB (byte) sectors. However, this is beyond the scope of iMPACT. iMPACT will only erase the 64kB sectors and will program using the page programming command. More granularity than 64kB erases is rarely needed for FPGA configuration because there are not many bitstreams that are smaller than 64 kB.